Japanese Latin Americans Seek Paymens for WWII Injustices

By Hector TobarLos Angeles Times

The police came to take the family away: a husband and wife and four
children, each allowed to pack one suitcase. The family land, including a
cotton plantation, was lost forever. Placed on a ship, guarded by soldiers
with machine guns, they sailed across an ocean to a concentration camp.

The camp was in Crystal City, Texas. And the soldiers with the doughboy
helmets who took Alicia Nishimoto and her family from Peru were members of
the U.S. Army.

It is a little-known, dark chapter in U.S. and Latin American history.
During World War II, the Roosevelt administration arranged the detention of
more than 2,200 people of Japanese ancestry from 13 Latin American
countries, the overwhelming majority of them from Peru.

Although no official explanation for the internment was ever offered,
historians believe the Japanese Latin Americans were abducted for reasons
similar to the much larger detention of Japanese-Americans on the West
Coast of the United States: They were believed to pose a military threat to
the United States and its allies.

Nishimoto, then a 10-year-old citizen of Peru, spent two years in the
Texas internment camp. Half a century later, she and hundreds of other
abducted Latin American Japanese are still being denied an official letter
of apology from the U.S. government.

The reason for the denial is a bureaucratic Catch-22 that has kept alive
the sting of the old injustice: since the Japanese Latin Americans were
brought to the United States against their will, they were not legal U.S.
residents and thus not eligible for an apology under the law.

"How can they call us illegal immigrants when we were forced to come
here?" asks Nishimoto, who for the past 33 years has lived in Southern
California.

A few of the Japanese Peruvians were exchanged for Americans held in
Japan, but most spent the duration of the war behind the barbed wire of the
camp in southwest Texas. Some were held until 1948, three years after the
war's end.

Frustrated after being denied both the apology and the redress payments
first granted to Japanese-American internees in 1990, the Latin American
Japanese plan to file suit this week in federal Claims Court in Washington,
D.C.

"These actions were a violation of international law," says Grace
Shimizu, an activist in the movement for redress and the daughter of a
Peruvian-Japanese man held in the camps. "This was kidnapping civilians
from a third country not at war, taking them across international waters
and jailing them. It's important to hold the government accountable."

Officials with the Justice Department's Office of Redress Administration
acknowledge the detentions and transportations occurred, but say the Latin
American Japanese are not covered by the provisions of the 1988 reparations
law, which was restricted to those who were U.S. citizens and legal
residents at the time of their detention.

Justice Department officials said Congress recognized the suffering of
the Latin American Japanese in the 1982 report of the Commission on Wartime
Relocation and Internment of Civilians. A small number of Peruvian Japanese
did receive redress payments because they became legal residents before the
June 1946 date established by the law.